Clarke goes cold inside.
Someone’s gearing up for the finals.
Family Values
Ever since the founding of Atlantis, Jakob and Jutta Holtzbrink have kept to themselves. It wasn’t always thus. Back on the surface, they were flamboyant even by corpse standards. They seemed to delight in the archaic contrast they presented to the world at large; their history together predates the Millennium, they were married so very long ago that the ceremony actually took place in a church. Jutta even took her husband’s surname. Women did things like that back then, Rowan remembers. Sacrificed little bits of their own identity for the good of the Patriarchy, or whatever it was called.
An old-fashioned couple, and proud of it. When they appeared in public—which they did often—they appeared together, and they stood out.
Public doesn’t exist here in Atlantis, of course. Public was left behind to fend for itself. Atlantis was the crème de la crème from the very beginning, only movers and shakers and those worker bees who cared for them, deep in the richest parts of the hive.
Down here, Jutta and Jakob don’t get out much. The escape changed them. It changed everyone of course, humbled the mighty, rubbed their noses in their own failures even though, goddammit, they still made the best of it, adapted even to Doomsday, saw the market in lifeboats and jumped on board before anyone else. These days, mere survival is a portfolio to take pride in. But the Holtzbrincks have not availed themselves of even that half-assed and self-serving consolation. ßehemoth hasn’t touched them in the flesh, not a single particle, and yet somehow it seems to have made them almost physically smaller.
They spend most of their time in their suite, plugged into virtual environments far more compelling than the confines of this place could ever be. They come out to get their meals, of course—in-suite food production is a thing of the past, ever since the rifters confiscated “their share” of the resource base—but even then, they retreat back into their quarters with their trays of Cycler food and hydroponic produce, to eat behind closed doors. It’s a minor and inoffensive quirk, this sudden desire for privacy from their peers. Patricia Rowan never gave it much thought until that day in the Comm Cave when Ken Lubin, in search of clues, had asked What about the fish? Perhaps they hitched a ride. Are the larvae planktonic?
And Jerry Seger, impatient with this turncoat killer posing as a deep thinker, dismissed him as she would a child: If it had been able to disperse inside plankton, why wait until now to take over the world? It would have done it a few hundred million years ago.
Maybe it would have, Rowan muses now.
The Holtzbrincks made their mark in pharmaceuticals, stretching back even to the days before gengineering. They’ve kept up with the times, of course. When the first hydrothermal ecosystems were discovered, back before the turn of the century, an earlier generation of Holtzbrincks had been there—reveling in new Domains, sifting through cladograms of freshly-discovered species, new microbes, new enzymes built to work at temperatures and pressures long thought impossibly hostile to any form of life. They catalogued the cellular machinery ticking sluggishly in bedrock kilometers deep, germs living so slowly they hadn’t divided since the French Revolution. They tweaked the sulfur-reducers that choked to death on oxygen, coaxed them into devouring oil slicks and curing strange new kinds of cancer. The Holtzbrink Empire, it was said, held patents on half the Archaebacteria.
Now Patricia Rowan sits across from Jakob and Jutta in their living room, and wonders what else they might have patented in those last days on earth.
“I’m sure you’ve heard the latest,” she says. “Jerry just confirmed it. ßehemoth’s made it to Impossible Lake.”
Jakob nods, a birdlike gesture including shoulders as well as head. But his words carry deniaclass="underline" “No, I don’t think so. I saw the stats. Too salty.” He licks his lips, stares at the floor. “ßehemoth wouldn’t like it.”
Jutta puts a comforting hand on his knee.
He’s a very old man, his conquests all in the past. He was born too early, grew too old for eternal youth. By the time the tweaks were available—every defective base pair snipped out, every telomere reinforced—his body had already been wearing out for the better part of a century. There’s a limit to how much you can fix so late in the game.
Rowan gently explains. “Not in the Lake itself, Jakob. Somewhere nearby. One of the hot vents.”
He nods and nods and will not look at her.
Rowan glances at Jutta; Jutta looks back, helplessness on her face.
Rowan presses on: “As you know, this wasn’t supposed to happen. We studied the bug, we studied the oceanography, we chose this place very carefully. But we missed something.”
“Goddamn Gulf Stream shut down,” the old man says. His voice is stronger than his body, although not by much. “They said it would happen. Change all the currents. Turn England into goddamn Siberia.”
Rowan nods. “We’ve looked at a lot of different scenarios. Nothing seems to fit. I think maybe there might be something about ßehemoth itself that we’re missing.” She leans forward slightly. “Your people did a lot of prospecting out around the Rim of Fire, didn’t they? Back in the thirties?”
“Sure. Everyone was. Those bloody Archaea, it was the gold rush of the Twenty-First.”
“Your people spent a lot of time on Juan de Fuca back then. They never encountered ßehemoth?”
“Mmmm.” Jakob Holtzbrink shakes his head. His shoulders don’t move.
“Jakob, you know me. You know I’ve always been a staunch supporter of corporate confidentiality. But we’re all on the same side here, we’re all in the same boat so to speak. If you know anything, anything at all…”
“Oh, Jakob never did any of the actual research,” Jutta interjects. “Surely you know that, he was really more of a people person.”
“Yes, of course. But he also took a real interest in the cutting edge. He was always quite excited about new discoveries, remember?” Rowan laughs softly. “There was a time back there when we thought the man practically lived in a submarine.”
“I just took the tours, you know. Jutta’s right, I didn’t do any of the research. That was the gel-jocks, Jarvis and that lot.” For the first time, Jakob meets Rowan’s eye. “Lost that whole team when ßehemoth broke out, you know. CSIRA was conscripting our people right across the globe. Just waltzed right in, drafted them out from under our noses.” He snorts. “Goddamn greater good.”
Jutta squeezes his knee. They glance at each other; she smiles. He puts his hand over hers.
His eyes drift back to the floor. Very gently, he begins nodding again.
“Jakob wasn’t close to the research teams,” Jutta explains. “Scientists aren’t all that good with people, as you know. It would be a disaster to let some of those people act as spokespersons, but they still resented the way Jakob presented their findings sometimes.”
Rowan smiles patiently. “The thing is, Jakob, I’ve been thinking. About ßehemoth, and how old it is—”
“Oldest goddamn life on the planet,” Jakob says. “The rest of us, we just dropped in later. Martian meteor or something. Bloody ßehemoth, it’s the only thing that actually started here.”